


yetzer lev-ha-adam ra

by mahkent



Category: Original Work
Genre: Drug Addiction, Judaism, M/M, Undead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-07 18:29:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 8,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16413590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahkent/pseuds/mahkent
Summary: יֵצֶר לֵב הָאָדָם רַעthe imagination of the heart of man is evil.





	1. responsibility

Fernando finds out about Nathan’s addiction on a dark, rainy day. 

It feels appropriate, that the outside is just as miserable as he becomes. Nate doesn't show him on purpose- he just rolls his sleeve up absentmindedly. Not realizing his mistake, not realizing that Fernando can see the dark needle marks still so red and the raised angry veins down Nate’s forearm.

Fernando berates him, then. He grabs Nathan’s then muscled forearm and drags him closer, he spits about how Nate’s signed his goddamn death sentence, and all Nathan does is shrug. He acts like he could ever kick the drug binding him to a needle full of Satan Fire. The newest drug, the newest craze, highly addictive, an insanely high overdose rate. Poison to anyone’s veins. It burns them from the inside out, rotting their brain then their body then torching their life away. 

He has the power to stop this. He could drag Nathan thrashing and howling to rehab, he could root through his best friend’s house and find every little bottle and every needle and break them all, he could force Nathan to do something about it.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t have the balls to fight Nate on this, so he watches his best friend spiral deeper and deeper into addiction. Those veins raise until they collapse and he’s stabbing needles into his forearm, upper arm, anywhere it’ll fit. Weight falls off his body until he’s a skeleton. The drug causes hallucinations when he’s in vicious withdrawal, so he uses more; a vicious cycle. He becomes bitter and enraged and paranoid, hallucinating so much even when he isn’t in withdrawal that he can barely discern reality.

He doesn’t try to fight it. He could, he should, he’s responsible for Nate because the guy is an idiot and can’t make good decisions. He doesn’t. He doesn’t until Nate overdoses once, twice. It’s horrifying, what he finds when he speeds to Nathan’s house that accursed day he overdoses again. 

Nathan, curled on the floor seizing. Nathan, eyes wide and terrified with drool dripping from his lips; his muscles are snapping back and forth, his limbs thrashing out of his control. His hands scrape across the floor, scratching lines into the carpet. HIs belt around his arm, pulled tight to help find the vein, Fernando is almost sick.

When Nathan stops seizing after years, ages, impossible amounts of time (Fernando forced to kneel next to his friend, keeping him on his side so he doesn’t choke on his own bile; quivering and praying to a god Nate doesn’t follow that his friend doesn’t die) Fernando picks him up. His frail friend curled in his arms, fingertips brushing across his chest- he is afraid. Nathan isn’t in any mind to be afraid. The poison is still in his veins enough that he laughs, babbling something absolutely incoherent. 

Nathan only becomes afraid when the night sky above them turns into the stark white ceiling of the hospital. He hisses through his teeth and tries to struggle, Fernando sees how he struggles, but it’s useless. He’s checked into the hospital ( _“My friend, he overdosed on Satan Fire-” “Okay, sir. Calm down. We need to get him into the ER. Put him here, okay?” “Okay- is- is he gonna die?”_ And that nurse hesitated, she pulled the belt off of his arm and looked down with sad eyes, _“We’ll have to see.” she said_ ) and so many sedatives are pushed into his bloodstream to calm the fire that he’s unconscious for days afterward.

Nathan is his responsibility, he knows. He knows this so well when he sits in the plastic chair next to the hospital bed and watches Nathan sleep. The long dark hair pushed back, it frames Nathan’s sharp face and makes the darkness smeared under his eyes so, so visible. The IV needles pushed into his upper arm because anything lower is useless looks just as wrong as the plastic thing shoved deep into his throat, keeping him breathing when his body will not.

Maybe he gives up, then. When he sees Nathan wake up and reach for the IV needles, touching the tube and choking around the plastic in his throat, he gives up; Nathan gasps out first _fuck, where's the bottle-_ when he figures out the stuff being pumped into his veins isn’t the drug controlling him.

Maybe he gave up on his friend, his responsibility. Maybe when he gets a phone call a week later telling him that Nathan died after murdering a man he isn’t surprised. Maybe he’s even glad that his friend can’t suffer anymore, can’t degrade any further into a body running on tiny bottles of Fire and little else.

Power is the greatest responsibility. The Fire had power over Nathan. Fernando had the power to stop the Fire from ravaging his friend so thoroughly; he didn’t use it. His power sat neglected while Nathan spiraled down, down, down, so far down that Nathan died and came back twisted. Broken. His mind shattered, leaving so many pieces for Fernando pick up and try to glue back together with the sticky power he didn’t use as he should.

Power is the greatest responsibility. Such a shame, he thinks, that he didn’t trust himself to use it.


	2. bat country

Rush in his vein, it's what he needs to stop the screaming. 

A mental fiction built up in his head. The rushing, pounding of false people screaming in his skull, he has to stop them somehow or he's going to take a hammer and one-two-three bash his skull in; the needle in his veins turns the screaming to slow singing, pretty howling in his mind as his head lolls to the side and his eyes roll back. The dose hits hard. He has work today, like every day, but he doesn't care. The fire in his veins is too damn good and the pay is too damn poor at his shitty dead end job for him to bother schlepping his gay ass off the couch.

Too many doses and the demon has him by the neck, a noose turned to leash pulling him along a path he didn't think he'd go down. Maybe he's broken, dragged along this crooked and horned path. Maybe he's in too much agony constantly to do anything with his life but prowl for the next fix; further and further and further he goes, until one day the demon is tugging on his collar and the cold steel of a gun chills his palms.

He points the gun. He points it at a stranger, some man he doesn't know and doesn't care about. _Kill him,_ the demon says, _kill him and I'll give you some more._ The hissing in his head- he's caught in a fiery place suddenly, the demon in front of him laughing, the man staring at the gun and whimpering. The gun shivering in his hands so cold, the burning ache of need coursing through his body ravaging him like a fire through the brush.

The need is always there in the back of his mind. When he does manage to go to work, it's taking up most of his attention- hurts, it hurts, the customers have the chutzpah to fucking get angry with him when he isn't as cordial as they want. Like he isn't some schmuck behind a counter assembling false-fresh food. Like they aren't the ones so stupid to pay ten dollars for something they could make themselves for so much less. He shakes, twitches, he can't focus or remember what his shitty NPC lines are, he can't stop the way his chest feels like it's squeezing his lungs tight. His heart tries to escape, it races and slams against his bones, the pounding makes him want to be sick. More than once he has to run to the bathroom to puke his fucking guts out and then he still goes back and continues working. 

The worst part is the rage. The rage, it burns just like the ache and shudders and nausea, and one accursed day when he goes home he fills the whole needle. The bliss takes him so, so high, he's in the sky with the clouds so soft and the sun so bright until it abruptly shatters. Distantly he feels his body twitching, seizing, muscles tightening then slackening too quickly. A broken puppet on the ground, the sharp bones jutting through his skin - he sees it as if he's descending on his own body, is it real? - so visible. Seizure. Overdose. The needle marks in the crook of his elbow. Vomit on his lips because his body hates what he's put into it.

The gun shivers cold in his hand. He points it first at the man’s chest, shaking with breaths though it is, then he points it up at the man’s head. The righteous confidence he had before is fading when he sees the man’s lips move, hears him pleading _I have kids_ as the demon pulls the noose tighter around his neck and howls _READY TO IGNITE_ into his ear.

He doesn't know why he does it, truly. The trigger under his finger is so slim, so small, such an unassuming slip of metal. The safety, the other slip settled next to the trigger, it moves with his finger until both click back into their slots.

_Crack._

The ground underneath him splits and shatters, splitting beneath each of his feet as if he's causing it- is he, he wonders idly, as the maw opens wide such as a mouth. Red earth churns inside of it just like the red gore on the inside of the man’s head. The heat, the horror- claws gripping his shoulders with burning palms. She’ol is hot for good reason. It sears his flesh, curling the skin away into strips of crackling, cooking the flesh underneath; the claws sink and rip and shatter, his bones splintering under the pressure. 

It doesn't feel like death, no. He knows death- so close once, twice, veins so full of fire that his body shut down and he was left on the floor unconscious until his boss came to see why he wasn't answering his phone. He knows death, so close once, twice. This is not death. This is something else, something new; twisted and dark.

Two at once. What he knows is happening, being pulled down into the Earth; the second, what he thinks might be happening. Collapse. The headless body collapses, he does too, he’s writhing on the ground choking on foam until his broken body stops moving.

He dies, there, across from the man he shot in cold blood.


	3. avelut

A corpse stands outside his front door.

The corpse used to be his friend. He was called to the morgue months ago, as the only emergency contact Nate had was him- he was called. He saw his friend flat out on a table, eyes shut and blood pooling downwards. Pale. His arm still stained with blood from the needle marks, Nate was lying still on that fucking table. Not breathing, not alive.

A corpse stands at his front door. It’s looking down at the doormat, shoulders slack and hair hanging in its eyes. The tallit Nathan wore only when he was praying - never at synagogue, he didn’t trust the establishment towards his end of days - hangs around its shoulders, the white stained now with dirt. In fact, as Fernando looks closer, he sees dirt on most of the corpse. Stuck to Nathan’s dark suit, staining the bruised fingers of the corpse, clumped into its hair, mud on its shoes. 

His, maybe. The corpse at his door looks just like his dead friend. It waits just like Nathan used to, twitching slightly and shaking its head every so often. Fernando gathers his confidence as he recognizes more and more of his friend in the corpse. The corpse is dead- Nathan died seizing, choking on his own vomit, next to the man he shot dead. Nathan is a skinny, weak drug addict- surely his corpse couldn’t be too difficult to defeat should it come to it.

Fernando opens the door just a crack. The movement has Nathan looking up, blue eyes blank and fogged over; the faintest hint of recognition is behind the corpse’s eyes. It- he opens his mouth. The voice that crawls out of the dead man’s mouth is cracked and raw. “Fernd.” Nathan’s stupid nickname given only because he couldn’t read Fernando’s name when they were little, it digs a shovel of grief into his heart. Just as sharp as the shovel pushing dirt backwards into Nathan’s grave.

The service was quiet, Fernando remembers. Only he came. Nathan’s father didn’t, having long since given up on his son; Fernando was alone with the Chevra Kadisha men - gravediggers, those who prepared his body, the shomrim who watched over him until he was put into the ground. Fernando was the only one, so his lapel alone was the one torn on the right side. He said no eulogy, simply listened to one of the Jewish men recite psalms in Hebrew and then close with a prayer. They let him push shovelful after shovelful of dirt onto the plain box Nathan’s silent corpse rested in.

Nathan now is as silent as he was closed in that casket, beyond the rasped nickname. He stumbles as Fernando grabs his thin shoulder, guiding him into the living room. That thin body of Nathan’s looks so pathetic in the suit he was buried in, the tallit around his shoulders hanging limply. “Nate?” He asks, just to see if the corpse of his friend will respond.

Nathan doesn’t. His eyes are distant, fogged by death and confusion; his head is tilted to the side as if he can’t keep it upright. All Fernando can do is gently guide him to the bathroom and begin to take the funeral clothes off of his friend.

The tallit he folds neatly and rests on the counter. It's important to Nate, his only one. Even when he was high off his ass he respected it dearly. The suit, though, is ruined. Mud caked and smeared into the hems, dirt coating it and his fingers as if Nate clawed his way from the earth. Maybe he did- Fernando doesn't want to think about his friend, reanimated and terrified, clawing his way through the soil like some sort of movie zombie. He focuses on taking the jacket off, then the tie, then the dress shirt. Fitted so well to Nathan’s skeletal body despite how the casket was closed the entire time, the clothes are thrown to the floor. 

Topless now, his poor undead friend looks so much more pathetic than he did before. Collarbones jutting sharp against paper thin skin, ribs countable without even focusing, Nathan is so poorly fed that Fernando wonders how he hadn't died of starvation before he shot that man. Then his eyes slide to the needle marks in the crook of each arm, the veins there collapsed and dark. Fresher marks on the veins of his arm because the veins in the crooks of his arms were rendered too useless for needles to slide into.

It makes him sick. It made him sick seeing his once vibrant friend twist and warp into an addict, such a victim to the people around him who swore the drug (Satan Fire, he googled it and was horrified) would make him feel happy. It didn't- no one was happy. Fernando was forced to watch Nathan wither into a husk, withdrawal or hunger suppression stealing weight off of his body. He was forced to get a phone call from Nate early one morning, a week before he died. 

Slurring across the connection, his friend pleaded _Fernd- F- help, I can't, breathe-_ before choking. Gurgling, the phone hit the ground, Fernando heard his poor friend whimper. When he got to the house - driving far too fast, shattering every limit by at least thirty miles per hour - he saw Nathan, his poor Nathan, seizing. Eyes rolled back and drool-vomit-something sliding from his lips, Nathan was lying on the floor next to a needle and an empty bottle of that damned Satan.

Nathan now doesn't respond. Just as he didn't when he was seizing, he doesn't respond to Fernando’s questions or prompting or begging. He doesn't seem cognizant of anything, much less how he's come back from absolute death. 

Fernando feels just as alone as he did before. The corpse of his friend, now dressed in oversized sleep pants and a loose shirt (Nate is so much smaller than Fernando), he allows himself to be pushed into a bed. He doesn't sleep, but he's laying down and seeming relaxed. Fernando, though? Fernando is wracked with anxiety, fear. Guilt at not being able to help his friend and grief because the corpse lying in his bed isn't fully Nathan anymore.

He slides into the only bed he has, next to the corpse. It's cold- Nathan’s cold, not breathing or moving but accepting how Fernando has to pull him close. Fernando stays awake until the corpse's eyes stop staring at him and slide shut, then he falls sleep with the body in his arms warmed by his own heat.


	4. honey sweet

Today is a lucid day. 

Fernando suggests playing video games like the old days before death. Today, Nathan is keeping his tallit around his shoulders; it's cold, and he's afraid. It makes him feel protected from the wrathful god who has no qualms tearing him asunder just to piece him back together.

“...They cut my tzizit.” He says, out of the blue. It's something he knew would happen- the Chevra Kadisha do it, signifying the death and the fact that the tallit is no longer for use. Which means he can't use it. Then again, though, he doesn't want to use it when Elohim is such a harsh and cruel being. 

“What?” Fernando murmurs, focused on the video game. His pretty dark eyes don’t look at Nate, no, they shift, but they don’t flick over. His soft lips are pressed close. Nervous.

“The-” He touches the fringe of his tallit, fingers brushing gingerly over the clipped portion. Wool frayed where the string was cut off, its likely soft, but his blood-bruised fingertips haven't let him feel anything in ages. “That thing. It, the cutting means I’m dead.”

“You are, though.” Fernando murmurs. He looks down, but not at Nate; ever since he came back, Fernando hates looking at him. Something about the mottled, blood-bruised skin (so dead yet so alive), something about the hazy eyes. It makes Fernando scared of him.

“I know. Just- it's weird. Don't. I don't think ‘bout it much.” It's the truth. The horrors he endured, the brutal destruction of his very being just to be pieced back together wrong, it makes him sick to think about and his stomach doesn't even work anymore. 

Fernando is silent, for a moment or two. The only sound is the clicking of the controllers and the quiet screams from the video game. Then he speaks, eyes not moving from the television like he's afraid to look at Nate. “What was it like? Being dead?”

“Bad. Sh- shit- just. All of it so bad so bad-” He feels the language slipping away from him. In She’ol there were no words- his tongue was ripped from his skull first thing when he woke there, torn from the root by the devil controlling him for so long. Hot-then-cold blood spilling from his lips as he tried to plead with it, he couldn’t- no air. Blood choking him and silencing him as the devil spirit yanked his collar now so, so real tight around his neck and stole the air from him.

They began with his fingers. Garden shears taking the tips off one by one, cracking bone and rending flesh with each quiet little snip. Fingertips gone- blood pouring again, more and more until he was drowning in the blood of his life. His end of days, red gone and body empty, so alone. The devil spirit peeled flesh off as if he were a goddamn thanksgiving turkey and left him bare, bones upon bones upon bones that it broke one by one. 

The worst part, though, was when Yahweh itself visited. Rarely, only once per year (what felt like years, ages, incomprehensible amounts of time to him because time didn't pass, but maybe it did?) the being would appear in the domain of the dead. It would stand in front of him, form shifting; seven heads and ten horns and ten crowns, the snake with an apple in its coils and a smile on its cruel face, human and so cruel so selfish, a storm breaking over the horizon, a wheel of fire and wings and eyes harsh and cruel- so, so much at once. Nathan’s feeble brain, rotted by death and drugs and torture as it was, could barely look upon his god. It hurt, it ached so cold that it turned to vicious fire that numbed him and set his nerves alight.

Yahweh, Elohim, god on high, it stared at him. To it he is but a bug, a shitty sim that can be reset or maimed or destroyed at any moment. Coding error in the computer of the universe that he is, Nathan spat blood at Yahweh’s feet. Elohim, Yahweh, it looked down at him with fury and tore him asunder.

A billion years seems a stunningly short time, now. A billion years pass as Yahweh ripped him atom from addicted atom, torn asunder and left in shreds for ages- those years seem so long as he's left stranded. No more light. No more thinking. No more remembering. Just gore and guts hanging like decorations, his guts, apart from his flesh and his flesh isn't together either. The leash around his neck yanked tighter, tighter, the incomprehensible being looked down at him and his body snapped back together. Guts fitting, blood spilling still from his lips at Yahweh’s feet, Nathan quivered before his god, his devil.

Nathan quivers now. He's barely cognizant of Fernando talking, consumed so wholly by the memories-turned-hallucinations, Yahweh before him and the devil spirit behind him, Fernando by his side grabbing his shoulder with one soft hand. He speaks, slowly, softly. It filters in through his still ears so slowly. 

_Nate, listen to me. Look at me. You're fine. You're in my house- well, our house now, you're in our house. We're sitting on the couch playing video games. You're safe._

His name from those lips in that honey soft voice makes him calm. _Nate._ Fernando never calls him Nathan, just Nate, voice softly accented and pretty. In She’ol he had no name, only referred to as inhuman snarls and a barked slur when he tried to plead with no tongue. To the devil spirit he was only a beast, a dog for it to torture and muzzle and laugh at.

_Nate._ His name, his name that he almost lost to the ageless horror of She’ol. Fernando’s hand moves from his shoulder to his hair, threading through the long strands and straightened them out, blunt fingertips brushing over his scalp and cheek when he trails down the overgrown sideburns. Fernando, the blessing that he is, he simply pulls Nate close- intimacy that he's refused for so long. 

Nate knows Fernando fears him. He heard, when Fernando has them sleep in the same bed, how his poor friend whimpers from night terrors. He sees with his too-good night vision (dead eyes shining red, he knows from catching himself in the mirror at night like a goddamn cryptid) that Fernando wakes with hot fear spilt over his pretty, pretty face. His poor best friend- terrified, confused, he shoves Nate off the bed and screams _YOU’RE DEAD_ as if he's used to seeing an apparition beside him. Maybe he is, Nate always thinks when he’s sprawled on the floor with his hands up. Maybe Fernando _has_ been seeing the addict Nate was (was, he can’t shoot up anymore and it fucking _kills him_ ) curled beside him.

For now, Fernando doesn’t fear him. The brick wall of a man that Fernd is, he holds Nate close and pauses his petting to shift Nate into his lap. That warm body - distantly warm, he can’t feel much anymore - presses into his, soft where his isn’t, curved where his is sharp. It brings him back to reality, this; a foreign experience. In life Fernando was terrified of this, he remembers. Nate asked only once, and the answer made Nate feel sick. (Back then he could. He misses the feeling of his stomach crawling and his mouth aching at times.) Fernando muttered that he _can’t be a fag,_ looking like such a kicked puppy.

For now, Nate tucks his head into the crook of Fernando’s soft neck. He relaxes into the hold as Fernando presses his strong nose into Nate’s hair and starts petting the fine hair at the nape of his neck, curling it and moving his fingers away so it slides off. Nate focuses on what little he can feel- the warmth emanating from his best friend’s heart, so _alive_ , seeping into his own cold heart. Fernando’s legs are soft under his where he was put to straddle them. Fernando’s lips are pressed into his scalp, soft and warm and so, so pretty, he knows. He relishes in the way he can feel that heart beat and hear every slow breath. So alive, so alive, Nate’s so glad Fernando is here under him, against him. 

And man, does he love Fernando. It’s not something they discussed when he lived- Fernando was afraid, so afraid that he never admitted any attraction to Nate even though Nate saw it in his dark, dark eyes. It wasn’t physical. Never physical, even though Nate always wanted to run his hands down that strong-soft body, he didn’t want to upset Fernando. He only wanted to make Fernd happy. It wasn’t hard, usually; he just had to be there, and Fernd would be there for him.

Not that he was great at that, in his end of days. He’d wrap his belt around his arm as soon as he woke up (if he ever fell asleep, which he didn’t really) and stick a needle into his flesh because his veins had collapsed so badly he couldn’t use them, and he’d be gone for a few hours. The pattern would repeat until he was so high he could barely think, floating on waves of fire and relishing the heat in his veins. He’d ignore the dozens of messages ( _Where are you? Are you okay? You haven't answered me in weeks, jackass. Your boss said you haven't showed up in days. Fucking call me back._ ) to mark his flesh again, again, again.

He can’t do the drug that kept him alive but killed him slowly, now. His blood is black sludge and it would hurt Fernando too much to find another mark in his cold flesh. (Nathan tried only once after he came back, and he had to cut his arm open to get the fluid out because it simply wouldn’t flow through his stiff veins. Fernando smacked him across the face for that, screaming about how _you already fucking DIED, and you're trying it AGAIN?!_ , voice cracking and dark eyes filling with unshed grief.)

Fernando’s honey sweet voice draws him back into the now. _You’re safe with me, Nate,_ he murmurs. His fingers are still drawing through Nate’s hair. His breath is warm on Nate’s cheek and ear, and it’s all Nate can do not to fall asleep just like this. (Does he need sleep? He doesn’t care when he wakes after Fernando, still curled in his strong-soft arms, warm from his friend’s body heat.)

Fernando pulls his head back to look at Nathan’s face. That warm skin is flushed just a bit, warmer on the cheeks and ears, those soft lips are curled into the sweetest smile he's ever seen. Honey- it's what Fernando is, so sweet it almost hurts at times, warm and beautiful and so delicious. Nate knows it's too late now but he always wanted to kiss those soft lips, treat Fernando with the gentle intimacy he so wholly deserves. 

The smile is safe. He's safe; Fernando gives him a place to stay and gives him the care Nate so desperately missed in She’ol in return only for a portion of the rent and Nate’s care in return. Fernando finally, _finally_ is holding him close like Nate’s always wanted. 

He loves Fernando.


	5. you pray so hard on bloody knees

Nate doesn't pray anymore. 

He wishes he did. He wants so bad to trust Yahweh, he wants to bad to have that innate sense of comfort his religion gave to him. Faith- it’s what kept him going for a lot of his life. He had a god to fear, he had a god he trusted to enact its harsh reign. He just didn’t think the harsh reign would fall upon his thin shoulders.

It breaks your faith, seeing your god. Once you _know_ they’re real it’s hard to see them as more than a fierce beast who is fully willing to completely ruin you. Nate remembers the horror, the shame- they took his fingers and his tongue to stop him from pleading or fighting back. He was too focused on how his mouth ached (he couldn’t taste his own blood but he felt it pooling in the softness of his throat) and how the stumps he had burned when he tried to curl them. 

It breaks your faith when your god rips you apart. Nate stared up at his god and spat blood at its feet not even on purpose, his mouth was just full and swallowing it made him sick to his dead stomach. His god tore him atom from accursed atom and let him hang for moments, bytes of a shameful simulation. Nate saw behind that curtain of faith and his god was so viscerally cruel that when he was pieced back together ages later he was sick. 

He doesn’t want to go back. Endless rebirth was supposed to be a curse- he thinks so, living forever as a corpse, as property, it’s supposed to be a curse. He can’t help but prefer this. Up above ground, above the grave he was buried in, life is okay. He has Fernando. He isn’t being tortured- his tongue and fingers are solidly set in their places.

Fernando is the most important part, really. In She’ol there was nothing but pain and fire and the sweet release of darkness. In the living world he has Fernando- the honey-sweet taste of friendship and love, he loves Fernando, he loves Fernando so, so much. He loves every time Fernd grabs his thin shoulder and pulls him down onto the bed; they don’t kiss, they don’t do anything but lay against one another, but he loves it so much. Fernando’s cheek against his own, their legs tangled together (and god, are Fernd’s soft and long and sexy-)

It’s the intimacy that he missed when he lived. Intimate only with the needle and the tiny bottles he got from people he didn’t even know behind run-down apartments, his life was paycheck to paycheck and twenty to twenty handed over to those people with marks just like his. It was forgetting about Fernando in lieu of falling asleep on the floor of his apartment, eyes rolled back. It was waking and going to work with a migraine and hallucinating the dishwater drowning him, crawling into his throat and soaking him to the core- flipping the knife in his thin fingers so he’s holding it like he’s going to stab someone-

It’s the intimacy that he has now, even though his body is cold and sometimes stiff. Fernd doesn’t care about that anymore. He holds Nate close, long fingers threading gently through the hair he’s afraid to cut because it doesn’t grow anymore, he holds Nate and smiles sweetly - he feels it against his cheek, teeth and soft lips warm against his skin, and god. God who hates him, he loves Fernd.

It’s something that always dug at him when he wasn’t drugged off his ass. It was his other high, his first high. Seeing Fernando smile and laugh and oh, man, when Fernando laughs so hard he snorts it used to make Nate’s heart pound so hard it felt like his sternum would break. (It did in She’ol, cracked inwards by the devil spirit. He still feels the snap on bad days.) And the way Fernd would talk about stuff he liked- he’d babble, ramble, certainly it didn’t make much sense and Nate never quite caught it all, but it was so Fernando that he would laugh and press his head into Fernando’s strong arm. He’d listen because that rush he felt around Fernd was better than even the Fire.

Now that he can’t use the Fire (he tried. It didn’t work, the blood in his veins is sludge now and couldn’t carry a damn thing) the only high he truly has is Fernando. The love he feels, hot and heavy and warm in his cold chest, it feeds the high until he outright giggles at Fernd. He presses his face against his best friend’s, eyes shut because he can trust him. Fernd again runs his long fingers through Nate’s hair. 

Fernd does that a lot, Nate finds. It’s always idle as if his friend doesn’t realize he’s doing it at first- then it’s active. Fernd starts at the roots, going down until the strands are untangled. He’ll swirl his fingers through the soft hair at the nape of his neck. Playing, toying, the sensations dull yet like fire through his skin. A good fire, keeping him warm and safe, not destroying- never destroying. Fernd doesn’t have a bad bone in his entire handsome body.

Finally intimate. Nate would find it weird that it only happened after he died and clawed his way from the earth, but he doesn’t, not really. The undead aspect of his existence doesn’t factor into either of their worlds. All that matters to Nate (and Fernd, probably) right now is that they’re close, together, so _alive_ that his death doesn’t matter. Nothing matters to him but Fernando’s smile and laugh and gentle personality.


	6. Chapter 6

The corpse in his house is something new.

It’s not quite Nate anymore. It’s a new being, a new Nate, almost like his old friend but tainted by the dirt over the grave with the simple headstone saying

_Nathan Sagi Cohen  
May 31 1991  
May 31 2018_

and nothing else.

Physically, the corpse is a snapshot of what Nate was at the end of his life. Skinny, scrawny, collapsed veins and sallow cheeks. It’s a snapshot of everything Fernando hated about Nate- his addiction, the needles controlling his poor friend. Nate was slave to a tiny bottle and his belt around his arm. Fernando tried, only a little, to fix Nate- he tried enough to sate his own guilt and then he gave up.

The corpse is sickly, almost. Fernando will pull it (him, it’s still Nate somewhere in there. The lights are on but no one’s truly home) into the bedroom and push him, him into the bed because the corpse- because Nate always seems so tired. He’ll wrap his arms around that cold body and hold him close because he’s terrified Nate will disappear if he lets go.

The fact that Nate’s dead is almost comforting, almost good; he can’t be addicted anymore. He can’t use. (Fernando walked in on him trying only once, that tiny corpse sitting cross-legged on the floor, and Fernando lifted him by the collar and slapped him so hard he dislocated that thin jaw. He screamed for only the second time at his friend, again about drugs, again about killing himself.)

It’s Nate. It’s _Nate_ , his friend shaken by whatever he saw in the afterlife. He mutters about _She’ol_ on bad days, speech unintelligible and slurred like he knows not how to use his tongue. He mutters that nonsense and looks at his fingers, putting them to his lips like foreign objects, unsure of what they are.

Bad days are the worst part. Fernando wants to _help_ , he wants to help in all the ways he didn’t before that fateful day. Nate’s birthday, and he fucking _died_ , seizing across from a man he shot dead. Bad days are the worst because the lights are on in that fragile cold body but no one’s home. Nate’s beyond help, these days, lost to whatever he sees in his mind.

Fernando wants to help. The corpse walking around his house, he wants to help because it’s his friend somewhere in that head. It’s got all of Nate’s mannerisms but it’s twisted, different, wrong.

But sometimes it isn’t wrong. Sometimes it’s so close to Nate that he laughs with it. He plays like it’s his friend instead of some godless abomination, something inhuman and twisted. The mottled skin and blood pooled in his back tells him every day that it isn’t human.

Physically, it’s a being of death and hell. He’ll see it changing in the morning, he’ll see dark bruises on its back, highlighting each of its thin vertebrae a pitch black like ink, lighter tones where his upper back and ass laid against the wood of that coffin. The blood pools in his fingers as well, the fingers he treats like foreign objects at times, staining them black like they’re painted. It makes him- it- whatever, the corpse, Nate, look like what it is. Dead. A corpse he has illegally in his house.

He can’t help but indulge the delusion. It isn’t Nate, he _swears_ it isn’t. He still finds himself playing along more and more as it talks like Nate. It walks like Nate, a certain swagger, a certain bravado in his short stride. It dresses like Nate, too-large jeans (because Nate could never find the right size- he was too short, a bit too wide in the hips for anything to fit well) and too-large shirts. It wears that damned metal band hoodie (something with a winged skull in white and red, it’s black and warm and- it’s Nate’s. Not a corpse's.) and keeps the sleeves halfway hiding its blackened fingers.

He misses Nate. The corpse fills the void in his chest just well enough that he doesn’t have to think about Nate’s gravestone sitting forgotten in what Nate used to call the _bet shalom_.

The house of peace.


	7. eternal rest

She’ol was colorless, for the most part.

Pitch black so dark it was almost clear to him, an endless expanse of nothingness drowning his senses in ink and leaving him in endless peace. He’d hide in that dark and wait until the static drowned his brain. He’d wait until he was nothing, one with the dark, a faint shadow like he should have been - death was supposed to be peaceful. He was supposed to be nothing.

Violent red so rich he could taste it. The devil spirit was red, passionate and vicious, and it made him red. Down his chin and on his hands and on his chest and oh, god, everywhere. Spilling from his lips as he pleaded with his whines and screams, it swamped his senses. Everything was red when the devil spirit grasped his collar and pulled it back so far he had to arch his back to avoid being throttled.

Bright white, yellow, orange. It was fire, it was Yahweh, it was vicious things coming to tear him apart. It was looking up and seeing his god- seven heads and ten horns and ten crowns, the snake with an apple in its coils and a smile on its cruel face, human and so cruel so selfish, a storm breaking over the horizon, a wheel of fire and wings and eyes harsh and cruel. The great deceiver who had Nate convinced for so long that it would save him. 

They broke him, then. The second time his god came before him, kneeling with its thousand forms, it put a hand - a thousand hands, so many different sensations filtering through his tortured skin - on his forehead. It stared into his dead eyes with its own, both sets of eyes rolling in their sockets, he sobs openly as it smiles with fangs and venom spilling from its own lips. It leans closer and closer, shifting, shifting, it shifted to the face of the Fire and spilt its golden venom into him.

Pitch black again, pitch black of no light. Grain of wood against his nose when he tries to lift his head, his stiff back pressed into something hard, he realizes far too slowly that he’s trapped. He screams then, shrill in the stifling darkness, he slams his palms into the wood but gets nowhere. He’s trapped.

It takes him what must be days to force the lid away. Slow progress hindered by the six feet of dirt above him, he fights through it filtering into the box and claws his way up. That takes but minutes, but it’s worse than being in the box. There’s no air - doesn’t he need to breathe? What is he? - so he chokes on dirt in his mouth, in his throat, but he doesn’t gag. Why doesn’t he gag?

Fingertips breaching the top, soil cascades off, he feels like he’s in a zombie movie. It’s a thought that makes something _click_ in his head; he’s dead. He’s dead, clawing his way out of his own grave, he’s undead and his mouth is filled with the taste of earth. Once he manages to get part way out, he spits out the dirt sticking to his dry teeth (everything is so _dry_ ).

The sky is a purple-black, pretty constellations like freckles in the night sky that he regards for a few moments. There were no stars in She’ol beyond the flashes of light behind his eyelids when his bones were cracking- he didn’t realize how much he missed them until now. He didn’t realize how much he missed the calm coolness of the night air until now.

When he stands, nice dress shoes sliding on the soil, he turns to look at what he knows is there.

_Nathan Sagi Cohen  
May 31 1991  
May 31 2018_

It doesn’t surprise him that it’s there. Every grave has one, and the fact that it doesn’t have any personal statements isn’t surprising either. He didn’t want one, he told Fernando that, he didn’t want his grave to be more important than his life. He didn’t want Fernando to miss him just because he was gone.

Reading it again just makes the crawling feeling in his chest worse. He died on his birthday and didn’t even _know_ it. On that accursed day, when the sun was going down behind his back and lighting that stranger’s face, he had just turned twenty-seven. He didn’t know. All he knew was the ache in his veins and the burn in his mind forced him to follow what his mind said, the hallucinations said.

Then again, he doesn’t know much right now. He knows the sky above him and the dirt below him; he knows that his rotted brain is _screaming_ about the honey-sweet feeling. What it is, he isn’t sure, he can’t remember anything but soft lips and brown eyes and hands brushing over his jaw. 

The ground beneath his feet turns from dirt to grass to concrete while he ponders the honey-sweet pouring through every crevice of his mind, his throat, his soul. Does he have a soul? Neshamah- torn from him, ruined, Yahweh ripped it from his weak body with its golden touch. Its venom in him, oh, god-

The concrete turns to steps turns to the wood of a porch. The door in front of him is a plain white, marked where hands and keys have slid across it. It’s familiar in a dull way, roiling deep within his decayed brain; he can’t remember why he’s here. For what feels like ages he stands there, head slowly falling to the side as he realizes that he’s lost.

He’s lost something, he can tell. There’s an emptiness in his chest - something not there. No thump-thump-thump of a drum forcing him on and on in life. He died how he lived, he thinks, heart thrumming so hard against his bone that it’d make him lightheaded. Now? Now there’s nothing. He can’t feel his bruised, blackened fingertips. There’s so much he can’t do right now. He can’t even think, really, all of his thoughts are whisps in the sky like clouds, they’re gone. 

Cognizant of very little but the dirt on his body (his tallit, his poor tallit, a tassel cut off and the white smeared dirt black), he stands and waits. What he waits for he knows not; he just knows that the honey in his mind is crushing any thoughts he might have, and he’s somehow fine with that.


	8. yetzer lev-ha-adam ra

Nate knew he was going to die eventually. 

It's just base statistics. Ninety-seven percent of Fire addicts die within a year of taking that first hit. A three percent chance of survival isn’t great, but he didn’t care when he was higher than the Empire State building.

Now, that doesn’t mean he thought about it. He tried his damndest to ignore how every mark and every hit brought him one step closer to his end of days. Every time the thought would rise to the front of his mind, he’d take another hit- a vicious cycle that sent him falling down the goddamn steps of death.

It’s what brought him to the point of standing at work, staring down at the dishwater and seeing it rise up and choke him. His body didn’t move, but it isn’t surprising to him when his body feels like a foreign object. His coworker (some older woman, he forgot her name at that point and hasn’t managed to remember it) asked him if he was okay and he said yes.

A liar, so many lies slipping through his lips. After the second overdose, he spent a week in the hospital telling the people (doctors?) that he was okay, he wasn’t going to go looking for another hit as soon as they released him, yes, he would go to rehab.

He won’t, he knows. As soon as he steps out of that hospital he slips away from Fernando and finds the dealer he knows best - not at all - and hands them the twenty that the hospital gave him back with his belongings that they pulled off his unconscious body a week before.

Nate knew he was going to die as soon as the hit took and he was high, high, so high that he heard the devil spirit hissing into his mind that he had to grab the gun he kept in his night stand, yes, he had to follow the innocent man the spirit lit up in his mind's eye, yes, he had to point the gun and shout nonsensical phrases half in Hebrew (phrases he didn't even know he knew-) and then pull that trigger. 

Nate knows he is going to die. It isn't a surprise when his body shuts down and the devil spirit drags him from his own body, screaming, howling; it isn't a surprise when the life fades from his body. 

He wishes it were.


	9. heliophobia

Giving up the guest bedroom isn't a big deal to him. He used it for storage at the most, and Nate's fine with the boxes stacked in the corner.

Nate's fine with a lot of things, now. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of issues with anything Fernando does; it’s like death stole the fight out of him, making him complaisant with anything and everything.

There isn’t much sacrifice to be made, bringing the undead into his home. He doesn’t have to feed Nate, nor does he really have to change any of his routines, because Nate will adapt to them. Nate is perfectly willing to do anything he’s told so long as he’s allowed that guest bedroom, the blankets and quilts on the floor in lieu of an actual bed.

It’s like having a dog. The weirdest things bring Nate to a panic. Always simple things, like the lights turned on at night, or any bright lights at all; if Nate’s having a bad day he’ll start hiding. Nate doesn’t understand that they need the lights to see, he just hides from them as if they burn him. Fernando will look for Nate, and find him curled under a side table like a small child, blackened fingers curled around the back of his neck and buried in that long hair. 

So he makes some sacrifices. He starts keeping the lights off. He replaces the curtains with some that block light but aren't completely opaque. And when Nate starts panicking, he takes a blanket and wraps it around his friend- it's like having a dog, it really is. He always sits by his friend and waits until the panic fades. Nate curls into his side, shaking, only then.

Conforming to Nate's needs is easy. Understanding them is less so; any question he has about what happened, why Nate shot that man and why he came back, they're brushed off with a wild look in those faded eyes. The most he gets is a mumbled you don't want to know in a haunted voice.

Nate sacrificed his life to get here, Fernando thinks. It's the least he can do to cut his friend some slack and turn the lights off.


End file.
